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Sudden Drop in Google

I'm writing about the sudden drop in our keyword rankings from our site www.OutdoorNativitySets.com - at first I thought this may be because our primary season is the holiday season - and we normally see a dramatic slope in sales & visits right after Christmas/New Years.

However, we have been listed on the first page of google for quite some time, made no adjustments to our keywords or site, period, and suddenly are 17th in the rankings. We're down 90% on one keyword ("nativity") and down 67% on our major keyword phrase ("outdoor nativity set").

We're pretty new to this and are trying to do SEO ourselves, any thoughts on why the sudden drop? Is it because we just have fewer organic searches to begin with?

I think you should also take care of some pretty basic Onpage factors such as:

Add some content with 5-6 instances of your main keyword.Also, use synonyms of your main keyword in your content. Most importantly, write content that is very useful for your website's human visitors sprinkling keywords in the right amount.

Add a h1 tag (not more than one per page). Use your main keyword in h1 tag.

I c ant tell you why your rankings have dropped maybe Google has found a load of doggy links and dismissed them, I don’t know. But I can tell you have a lot of problems in your site that are not helping your rankings. You have 40 pages excluded by robots.txt, you have links pointing to them pouring link juice into a black hole. If you really don’t want that indexed, you should add a meta “no-index, follow” tag to them, then the link juice will flow into and back out of the pages. You also have over 800 un-necessary redirects, each one leaking link juice. I say un-necessary because the links are internal links and you could point then at the correct destination and avoid the redirect and the leak. An example.The link to "http://www.outdoornativitysets.com/store/p/519-Nativity-Angel-2-Piece-Set-.aspx" has resulted in HTTP redirection to "http://www.outdoornativitysets.com/two-piece-nativity-angel-figures.html".

You have over 800 broken links, I did not look at all of them but most looked like they were to images, not as bad as links to pages but still not good.

Hope you don't mind me asking another quick question. I'm not quite sure how to fix the un-necessary redirects. We read that clearing up your URL without the "store/p/519...aspx" is better for SEO - so we created custom URLs to avoid that. Is that wrong?

Also our SEO Moz report says we only have one 4xx error (this is a broken link, correct?) I'm sorry - again we are brand new at this and trying to figure it out. 800 seems a bit overwhelming and I'm not sure how I can find those.

The links were to images, as I stated thats not so bad, but not the best.

i see a lot of redirects like this

The link to "http://www.outdoornativitysets.com/store/p/519-Nativity-Angel-2-Piece-Set-.aspx" has resulted in HTTP redirection to http://www.outdoornativitysets.com/two-piece-nativity-angel-figures.html.

you have a redirect from aspx, to html, there is no difference or advantage between the 2.

what you want is not extention at all, somthing like this. '/keyword /another-keyword' to gain an advatage.

What the main problem is with how you have done your url-rewrites, is that you have internal links pointing to the old urls, causing a 301 redirect to the new urls, this leaks link juice every redirect leaks link juice.

Since the are internal links you should make sure that they point to the finaly destination directly without a redirect, and without a link juice leak.

in the document above, you will see i listed 3 thinks needed to do when creating a url-rewrite,

1. create a rewrite rule

2. create a corresponding 301 redirecte for any external links that may point to the old urls since you can not correct the external links

3. you need to either correct every internal link, or create a outgoing urlrewrite so that visitors only see new urls, and therefor any new external links will be to the new urls.

I would look at moving your site to IIS7 server, as it is a lot easer to work with than IIS6

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